For whatever reason, I had a Palo Alto Networks cluster that was not able to sync. A manual sync was not working, nor did a reboot of both devices (sequentially) help. Finally, the PAN support told me to “Export device state” on the active unit, import it on the passive one, do some changes, and commit. Indeed, this fixed it. A little more details:
Continue reading Palo Alto Networks Cluster “not synchronized”
What failover times do you expect from a network security device that claims to have high availability? 1 ms? Or at least <1 second? Not so for a fully featured Infoblox HA cluster which takes about 1-2 minutes, depending on its configuration. Yep. “Works as designed”. Ouch. Some details:
Continue reading Infoblox Failover Debacle (Works as Designed)
Just a quick note concerning the session sync on a Palo Alto Networks firewall cluster: Don’t trust the green HA2 bubble on the HA widget since it is always “Up” as long as the HA interface is up. It does NOT indicate whether the session sync is working or not. You MUST verify the session count on the passive unit to be sure. Here are some details:
This is a step-by-step tutorial for configuring a high availability cluster (active-standby) with two FortiGate firewalls. Since almost all firewall vendors have different principles for their HA cluster, I am also showing a common network scenario for Fortinet.
Beside the HA1 and HA2 interfaces on a Palo Alto Networks firewall, there are the HA1/HA2 Backup and Heartbeat Backup options. I was a bit confused while reading the documentation of the high availability instructions since it did not clearly specify when and where to use the dedicated management port for what kind of “backup”.
Basically, it should read that there are two different ways on how to use the dedicated management for a HA Backup: the heartbeat backup OR the HA1 backup.